The Meaning of Sex Dreams

Pay attention to your dreams and nightmares; they may hold the keys to a your happiness.

Meaning of Sex Dreams
The Forbidden Zone

Have you ever had a dream that you were "doing it" with a member of your family, a relative or someone just as inappropriate? Your sex dreams may also reveal things about the way you feel about your relationships and your shared sexual behavior. Dreams can sometimes disguise sexual subjects and wrap the naked truth in all manner of symbolism. Explicit images of sex may appear in dreams.

For example, should you dream of having sex with a member of your family or someone completely inappropriate, it does not necessarily mean that you have a mixed-up sexuality. Psychologists point out that this type of sexual dream can be a symbolic message about your relationship with these people.

You may worry that you have these illicit feelings, but dreams of this nature are comparatively common.. There's no need to panic. Don't read too much into them.

Erotic dreams usually occur at times when you need a certain amount of release from tension. They are a safety valve that lets out your pent-up frustrations and sexual inhibitions. They may compensate for your unfulfilled lovelife. Dreams are often concerned with resolving problems and restoring emotional equilibrium.

If issues about sex are important to you or have been pushed out of your waking consciousness, your dreams will try to deal with these unresolved issues. Even nightmares can be therapeutic, as they draw to your attention many of the hidden fears that may be preventing you from moving forward.

Pay attention to your dreams and nightmares; they may hold the keys to a your happiness.

The Meaning of Sex Dreams

The sex dream and looking for the meaning of sex in a dream is something of a pastime for dream interpreters. Sexual content, feelings of love, flirtation, and nocturnal rendezvous are often very explicit in dreams.

So, in your sex dream, if you are a man and having sex with a very sexually attractive woman who is obviously wanting you, but you are having trouble "performing",  then it might be interpreted as the feminine part of you wanting to become a greater part of your outer life and identity.

You are struggling in the dream to function sexually because you are not comfortable with that side of you and so you do not letting it show up in public.

This would be the symbolism of the sexual difficulty he is experiencing in the dream, and is not foreshadowing that he will soon be impotent!

Unless...he has actually been having some problems in this sector... then the dream could be a night-time re-hashing of the real-life event that is most certainly causing some stress.

Or imagine an elderly woman dreaming that she is making love to a young beautiful man. This sex dream may embarrass and worry her thinking that she secretly desires someone half her age or even more.

The meaning of her sexual dream could simply be that she has only just started (a young man, rather than a middle-aged or even older man in the dream) begun to have a relationship with her masculine self, her animus.

How would she see a manifestation of that in real life? She might have been recently widowed and now, for the first time, she is taking care of bills, making financial and other business decisions, and in some way being more pro-active, in the way we think of men as being pro-active, independent, and entrepreneurial, than she has ever been in the past.

Or perhaps a woman who has become bitter in life due to failed relationships, and who has been in therapy, working on those matters, has now had a dream where she is making love to a faceless stranger, but the sensation she has is one of deep and tender feelings during the dream.

The symbolic meaning might be that she has finally opened up her inner self to a new relationship in real life, and also has opened her inner self to make possible the merging (sex) of her feminine and masculine self.

Likewise a man who dreams of having sex with a witch, or a woman who in some way is trying to undermine him or hurt him, or who frightens him in the dream, might, in waking life, ask himself what it is he is afraid of regarding the expression of his feminine self in real life.

The fact that he battles with the witch, or is frightened by the woman in bed with him in the dream, may symbolize that he rejects and fears his feminine side in real life, or that he feels if he expresses this nascent side of his personality he will be swallowed by it, suffocated, or in some other way lose himself .

If, after some time, he begins to dream of having good or loving sex with a beautiful woman, rather than with a witch-like creature, it would possibly be symbolizing that he has begun the process of accepting his feminine side and is now more at peace with the expression of that in his real life.

How often do we dream of sex ?

Studies reveal significant differences in how men and women dream about sex . However, when all is said and done, almost everyone at some stage in there life has one. Sex during dreaming is reported as a topic of at least 12% of male dreams and 4% of female dreams. This discrepancy is generally consistent with our waking sex drives, with men doing much more thinking about the topic than women. (It is said that men think about sex far more than 12% of their waking lives, though.) In his book Finding the Meaning in Dreams, G. William Dumhoff reveals some interesting data -

This table indicates that women often separate themselves from what is going on in the dream sexually, whereas men see themselves as participants. This can be significant to understanding why it is more common for men-particularly boys-to have orgasms in the dream state than it is for women. It also reveals the conflict that many women feel about the good-girl/bad-girl taboo.

Dream images that relate to sex

The question of images and symbols relating to sex in a dream is important. Sexuality is often cloaked in a heavy shroud of secrecy, either through childhood or throughout life. Freud did for sexual content in dreams what Henry Ford did for internal combustion. Suddenly everyone, everywhere had dreams of sex.  The following is a partial list of the phallic symbols you may find indexed in a Freudian dream interpretation book:

Not to be left out, women's sexuality was likewise a source of attention and interest for Freud. The following list is far less extensive than the list for male phallic symbols, but almost as diverse:

Certain sex dreams are simply romantic. Boy and girl meet in the dream and find themselves enjoying one another. This scenario commonly involves an attractive dream partner and a generally pleasing environment.

There is no violation of taboo, except for a sense that perhaps things are moving a little fast in the nocturnal relationship. Often, the dreamer has simply acted upon a desire for a relationship with a particular person. Freud's theory of wish-fulfillment is a sufficient explanation. Dreams are a rich source of fantasy and can be a way to deal with unfulfilled desires from waking life. Also as dreams are messages from the unconscious mind they can reveal our deep feelings and our true motivations. In particular they can bring to light many repressed sexual desires, our guilty feelings or our unexpressed fears about sex.

If a person has a high degree of repression, the person's fears and anxieties may be expressed through their dreams. Similarly the person's desire for greater fulfillment may be expressed in erotic dreams. If the sexual repression is severe, the dreams may be filled with sexual situations that the person would find shocking, embarrassing, or confusing. In such cases, there is often a big difference between the person's waking sexuality and the sexuality displayed in dreams. The person's day-to-day life may be emotionally sterile and sensually barren, but the dream life is full of eroticism and steamy sexual encounters. By paying attention to your dreams you can learn about your needs and desires and perhaps discover ways to make your life more sensual if necessary.